Free online calendar publishing, part 2: Google Calendar

This post is part two of a series in which I’ll summarize what I know about publishing calendars openly on the web, for free, using popular calendar applications including Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal.

Google Calendar

You’ll need a Google account. If you use Gmail you already have one. Start the calendar program by clicking the Calendar link at the top of the Gmail page.

To publish your calendar in ICS (aka ICAL) format, open the drop-down menu for your calendar’s name under the My Calendars heading, and select Calendar Settings.

The first tab on the ensuing page is called Calendar Details. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll see two sections containing sets of hyperlinked icons. The sections are labeled Calendar Address and Private Address.

You don’t actually have to make your calendar public in order to share both its ICS (ICAL) and HTML formats. You could use the second set of private links to publish (and otherwise communicate) those formats without exposing the contents of your calendar to the Google search engine. But if the goal is to advertise your calendar as widely as possible, you’ll want to do that. So, visit the second tab on this page, labeled Share this Calendar, and check Make This Calendar Public:

Now your ICS feed is active at an URL that looks like this:

http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/yourname%40gmail.com/
public/basic.ics

To capture your version of this link, right-click the ICAL icon in the Calendar Address section, and use your browser’s link-capture method: Copy Shortcut (IE), Copy Link Location (Firefox), Copy Link (Safari). You can paste the link into a web page that you publish, or into a web form or an email that transmits it to another site to which you want to syndicate your calendar.

Similarly, the web view of your calendar is active at an URL that looks like this:

http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?
src=yourname%40gmail.com&ctz=America/New_York

To capture your version of this link, right-click the HTML icon in the Calendar Address section and do as above. This link leads to a Google-hosted page for viewing the calendar.

If your web hosting circumstances allow you to use an HTML feature called IFRAME, you can instead embed the calendar in one of your own pages. The HTML code to do that is provided in the Embed This Calendar section.